The Naming of the Beasts Read online

  ‘Delicate choice of words.’

  ‘What do you want me to call it, Castor? She’s burning them out faster and faster. I don’t even know why we keep her around.’

  Because she brings in the money, I thought but didn’t say. Because academics come from far and wide to see the fifteenth-century ghost you’ve caught and pressed between two glass slides. And that brings the headlines, and the headlines grease the baking tin. But that was only half the answer. For J-J, the money was only ever a means to an end.

  Gil led the way down to the first floor. There was building work going on here too, but not so much. Massive pieces of equipment were being welded to walls and floors in labs that looked like something out of Victor Frankenstein’s wet dreams. I did the sums in my head. The MOU had only had two floors at the Helen Trabitch, and it was a smaller building. This move must have more than doubled the scale of Jenna-Jane’s operation.

  ‘Analytics,’ Gil said. ‘Technical and lab support. This is where blood and tissue sampling gets done. X-rays. Computer imaging . . .’ We’d come to a door beyond which an autopsy slab stood in the centre of a small bare room, surrounded by shelves of chemicals and porcelain drainage troughs. The tiled floor gleamed whiter than white, and the heady smell of formaldehyde hung in the air. ‘And autopsies,’ said Gil, ‘as required.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked. ‘It’s a weekday morning. Shouldn’t this place be humming?’

  ‘The official move is next week. There’s only a skeleton staff here right now.’

  It was such an easy straight line that I didn’t lower myself to touch it.

  ‘Everything here,’ Gil said, warming up a little now that he was getting the chance to show off all these shiny toys, ‘is dedicated. These facilities only serve the MOU - we’re hands-off to the rest of the hospital.’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘God forbid you get your CAT scanner all crowded out with sick people when you’ve got a new werewolf to play with.’

  Gil shrugged, indifferent to my sarcasm. ‘We’re healing a deeper sickness, Castor,’ he said. ‘But by all means, you just sit up there on the moral high ground and watch the waters rise. Bring a picnic.’

  I almost laughed out loud. It was J-J’s rhetoric, barely changed from the arguments I’d had with her before I walked out of here for what I thought was the last time. The end days were coming. Gwillam would call it Armageddon; J-J would call it a disequilibrum event, but they meant the same thing. The dead would fight the living for the top spot in Earth’s wobbly ecosystem, and it would be a fight that would leave the world we knew looking like New Orleans after Katrina. Laws are silent in times of war, Cicero said; J-J thinks they should shut up for the preliminary heats too. She can’t do her job with all that human rights garbage dinning in her ears.

  I turned away from the door, my breakfast churning slowly and queasily in my stomach. Gil hadn’t said anything about the leg and arm restraints, or why they should be needed on an autopsy table. I didn’t bother to ask because I already knew the answer.

  Part of the problem was that the law was still running to catch up with the way the world had changed. Vast edifices of legislation had been carved out over centuries to protect the rights of the living. Now we had the dead and the undead to worry about too, and the courts were barely scratching the surface of what that meant. If you died and then came back, either in the flesh or as a ghost, who owned your house, your money, your CD collection? Were you still married to the wife or husband you’d had before? Did you have the right to expect them to welcome you with open arms when you didn’t have a pulse any more? Could you give evidence in court? Maybe finger the guy who’d murdered you, or sue the doctor who’d botched your heart op?

  The test cases were being brought, and the questions were being asked in the parliaments of the world. In a few years’ time, there might be all sorts of legal restraints on what someone like Jenna-Jane could get away with. For now, a loup-garou enjoyed all the legal protections that a lab rat does, and a zombie had the same civil rights as roadkill.

  We descended to the ground floor. ‘This is mostly therapy and interview suites,’ Gil said.

  ‘Interrogation rooms,’ I translated.

  ‘If you like.’

  I didn’t. But as we walked along the main drag, my death-sense picked up the faint echo of a familiar tune.

  ‘We take security pretty seriously,’ Gil was saying. ‘Especially here and in the basement levels. There are alarm pulls in every room and every twenty feet along the corridors. The CCTV hook-ups have a hundred-per-cent overlap, and they’re monitored in real time by a team of three. Or they will be, once we’re up and running. There are weapons lockers on this floor and the one above, equipped with Mace and tasers and pepper sprays.’

  ‘Who provides the muscle?’ I asked. ‘Does J-J order in? They look like Nazi stormtroopers.’

  ‘They’re not regular hospital security, if that’s what you mean,’ Gil grunted. ‘Use your sense, Castor. You know what we get coming through here. How long do you think the average retired store detective would last against a loup-garou?’

  He had a point, but again I was aware of what he wasn’t saying: that the nature of Jenna-Jane’s work called for more serious and more unscrupulous muscle than a regular security firm would be likely to countenance. Judging from the look of the guys I’d seen at the front desk, they straddled the bruised and tender line that separates private cops from mercenaries.

  Gil was still talking - something about the locks and the pass codes - but his words were drowned out as that elusive sense became stronger with each step. Finally I stopped in front of a heavy windowless door with a keypad lock. A sign on the door read NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS, and another, below that, WITH ESCORT ONLY.

  Gil walked on, then looked back at me impatiently. ‘What?’ he said.

  I pointed at the door. ‘I was thinking I might pop in and say hello,’ I said.

  ‘To who?’

  ‘To Rosie Crucis. This is where you’ve got her stashed, isn’t it?’

  By way of answer, Gil walked back to join me and tapped the NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS sign with the knuckle of his index finger.

  ‘So authorise me,’ I suggested.

  ‘Eat me,’ Gil counter-offered. That sounded like an impasse to me.

  We walked on, rounded a few corners and found ourselves in a wider corridor. But the main drag ended in a huge vault-like metal door which at first glance seemed to have more hazchem warnings on it than the staff canteen at Sellafield. At second glance it was obvious that they weren’t hazchem warnings at all; they were wards of the pentagram variety, stamped onto steel, painted in high-contrast colours and riveted to the metal of the door. They were all stay-nots, carrying in a dozen dead languages their many playful variations on the theme ‘One more step and you’re deader than you already were.’

  The door had a whole lot of locks too - a keypad like Rosie’s door, a card-scan lock and two high-end ASSA Abloys. Gil unlocked them one by one, then turned to me with his hand on the bare steel pull-bar that the door had by way of a handle.

  ‘Smell anything?’ he asked me, with a nasty smile on his face.

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you were so spot on with Rosie,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going to say something.’ He swung the door open, and it hit me. Not a smell; that was just Gil’s way of saying we were in the presence of the dead, and the undead. From the dark space beyond the door a cacophony the like of which I’d never heard before rose up to assault my death-sense.

  I took an involuntary step back, and then another, raising a hand in front of my face as though to ward off a physical assault. After the second step, the corridor wall jostled me in the back and there was nowhere else to go. Swallowing hard, I tried to cope with the madness, while Gil watched me with a certain satisfaction.

  ‘It takes you that way the first time,’ he said. ‘The second time too. Come and take a look.’

  He
walked ahead of me into the dark, not bothering to look back to see if I was following. It was a taunt, and a challenge. It cost me a real effort to walk into that space behind him, a bigger effort not to clap my hands to my ears in a futile attempt to block out the sounds that weren’t coming in via my ears at all.

  We stood on a metal platform, our footsteps echoing like the thudding of a drum in a space much, much larger than a normal room. It was pitch black until Gil threw a lever on the wall just beside the door, and then a couple of dozen spots came up, stabbing down from above us to illuminate a vast cement-grey bunker.

  Gil crossed to a railing, leaned against it nonchalantly and looked out. I followed after a couple of seconds, my head still so full of thunderous dissonance that I could barely isolate Gil’s voice - the only real sound in the psychic tumult.

  ‘This is all new,’ he said.

  Below us was a space like the floor of a vast warehouse, sub-divided not by shelves or storage bins but by multi-storey structures like sturdier versions of the temporary offices that spring up on building sites. These weren’t portakabins though: they were breeze-block ramparts with steel doors but no windows - and the doors were close enough together to give some sense of what the spaces behind them might look like: there’d just about be room to swing a cat, so long as you kept the arc really tight.

  Steel steps and walkways connected the blocks, and the spaces in between them - broad corridors with steel-grille floors - were interrupted about every ten feet by chain-link barriers with gates inset. Nobody seemed to be manning these checkpoints, and all the gates were currently open: presumably they slammed shut automatically if one of the cell doors was compromised, to ensure that any occupant who got out of its tomb-with-a-view wouldn’t be able to wander too far.

  ‘Two hundred and forty cells,’ Gil said, ‘in case you were trying to count. But some of them are two and three-berth. And every single one of them is silver-lined - three hundred thousand square feet of silver sheeting in a one-to-three steel laminate mix that Professor Mulbridge designed personally. You know what that does to the undead and the Hell-kin. This space is actually as large as the entire building. And it didn’t even exist until we acquired the building. That’s how much we’ve got rolling for us now, Castor. You walked out of this operation just as it was getting big.’

  The jagged power chords of the dead and undead in their cells below us were still scraping against my nervous system, and my throat dried out in the space of three abortive swallows as I surveyed the bargain-basement Alcatraz. ‘Yeah,’ I croaked. ‘I’m kicking myself.’

  Gil turned to look at me with his lip curled.

  ‘My God,’ he said, ‘why are you still in this business?’

  There was no sense wasting any breath answering him.

  ‘You want to see what we’ve got,’ he asked, ‘or shall we go back upstairs so Professor Mulbridge can fan your face with a damp flannel?’

  ‘I’m good,’ I said. I turned my back on the screaming room and walked back out through the bunker door into the main corridor. But Gil didn’t follow me, and with the door still open the virtual uproar didn’t stop.

  This is the downside of being an exorcist. Our dark-adapted senses let us see an upside-down rainbow where the doubting Thomases see undifferentiated black; but we can’t turn them off. Closing your eyes and covering your ears just doesn’t cut it.

  Gil was enjoying my discomfort. He leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, and watched me sweat.

  ‘The two blocks right at the far end,’ he said, deciding to give me the inventory anyway, ‘are just zombies. Alpha block is decay parameter experiments; Bravo is toxicology. You can poison the DMWs, amazingly, if you get the right mix of shit. Stuff that accelerates cellular breakdown, or attacks the muscles.

  ‘Charlie through Echo are loup-garous. We run through a lot of them, because the main thrust of the research is incompatibility vectors - ways of forcing the human spirit out of the animal flesh so it reverts to being just an animal. It tends to be irreversible, so every werewolf we get is a non-renewable asset.

  ‘Foxtrot and Golf are a real circus. We keep all the unclassifieds there. Our resident vampire - if he is a vampire. A few referrals from other departments who’ve got the souls of people they used to know anchored inside them somehow and come here for a ghost-ectomy. Partially transformed loup-garous that got jammed halfway and can’t get in or out. The minor demons we’ve managed to raise.

  ‘And when we get to Hotel, well fuck . . .’

  I walked away, leaving him to slam the door and cycle the locks. That took a while, so I was able to walk all the way up to the second floor by myself, taking my time so that the ringing in my ears had stopped and my pulse rate had returned to normal by the time I got back to Jenna-Jane’s office.

  She was alone this time, and busy typing an email, but she looked up and swivelled her chair to face me as I walked in. She gave me another of those smiles. This time I could see the flames of Armageddon behind it.

  ‘It’s taken a certain amount of arranging,’ she said. ‘Father Gwillam was rather hoping that the MOU’s resources would be at his disposal for the duration of this little skirmish. But I’ve had to disappoint him. My answer is yes, Felix. I’ll work with you on bringing Ditko in.’

  ‘I changed my mind,’ I answered grimly. ‘Do what you like as far as Gwillam is concerned. Rafi would be better off dead than here.’

  ‘We won’t keep him here, Castor.’

  I blinked. I must still be disoriented from the basement and the full-frontal assault on my death-sense. ‘What?’

  ‘We’ll return him to the Stanger. Your friend will be safe. We’ll even help you, as far as we can, in removing the demon from him.’

  I laughed a little hollowly. ‘J-J, I just saw your zoo, so I know you didn’t turn into Mother Teresa while I wasn’t looking.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘This isn’t altruism. We help you, and you help us. I give you Rafael Ditko, and you give me . . .’

  She paused as if this was a game of some kind, as if she wanted me to guess.

  ‘What?’ I demanded.

  ‘Yourself, Felix. You come and work for me again.’

  6

  ‘The Usual Suspects,’ said Nicky Heath. ‘Three Days of the Condor. And Costa Gavras’s Missing.’

  Nicky smelled of Old Spice over other, more astringent chemicals, and the dark patches within his death-white pallor were more noticeable than they usually are. He was five years dead and doing pretty well, all things considered, but the loss of Imelda Probert’s professional services had hit him hard. Before Asmodeus killed her, the Ice-Maker was a faith healer for the dead: by a laying on of hands, she claimed to be able to lower a zombie’s core temperature and slow the processes of decay. Sounded like bullshit to me, when I first heard about it, but Nicky used her regularly and Nicky was unliving proof that whatever she did actually worked. Now though, he’d been thrown back on his own resources.

  Nicky makes sure that the Walthamstow Gaumont, the long-disused and recently renovated cinema he’s made his home, is as cold as an Eskimo’s sock drawer; and he flushes his system with ferociously potent chemical cocktails every few days, effectively pickling his flesh to keep it from going bad. But from the look of things, he was facing some kind of a crisis on the preservation front. I decided the tactful thing was to avoid mentioning it, and since I’d walked in on him in the middle of setting up a late-night triple bill, another subject was ready to hand.

  ‘You’re slipping, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I can actually see a link between those three movies.’

  ‘So?’ Nicky was even more pugnacious than usual. Something was eating him, so to speak, but if it was my complicity in Imelda’s death, I wasn’t feeling up to that conversation just yet. I felt - for about the twentieth time that day - an overwhelming, almost crippling desire to get rat-arse drunk. Nicky had one of the best wine cellars in London, but he limited himself to inhaling the breath of the wine:
the perfect companion for a boozy voyage into oblivion, in that he stayed sober and could be the designated driver on the return journey. But it was a joyride I couldn’t afford right then.

  ‘So, normally when you go for a triple bill it’s, like, they all had Filboyd Studge as key grip or something. It’s nice to see you go for something as obvious as conspiracy thrillers.’

  ‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ Nicky said, clipping the film reel onto the projector’s massive horizontal spindle. We were up in the projection room, which was so cold that my breath wasn’t just visible, it hung in the air like a thickening fog and refused to dissipate. Nicky ignored the cold. He didn’t exactly enjoy it, but it didn’t bother him, whereas bright sunshine made him duck and run for cover. If you’re serious about the zombie lifestyle, you have to become as narcissistic as a professional bodybuilder. You’re sailing into eternity in a leaky boat, so it helps to have an obsessive nature. Nicky was born and bred for the gig.

  ‘Meta-conspiracy thrillers,’ I repeated, deadpan, inviting him to hit me with the punchline.

  ‘They’re all movies where the conspiracy is part of a bigger conspiracy,’ he said. ‘Where you think you’ve worked it out, but all you did was tear away the first layer of wallpaper. Like those dreams where you wake up sweating but, hey, you’re still asleep and it’s just another dream.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get it. Is that how you see the world, Nicky?’

  ‘That’s how the world is, Castor. You just didn’t figure out yet who’s dreaming you. Maybe it’s Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, because the psycho-bitch-queen certainly seems to have a soft spot in her heart for you.’

  I grunted non-commitally. That wound was still a little raw. But Nicky seemed happy to stick with the subject.

  ‘So what did you tell her?’ he demanded. ‘Did you use adjectives? Gestures? I want a slow-motion action replay.’

  ‘I just walked out,’ I said, which was the truth. I hadn’t trusted myself to answer Jenna-Jane without going for her throat, which would have brought her pet Nazis down on me in all their goose-stepping fury. So I just turned round and headed for the door, walking past Gil McClennan, whose face as he stared at me was full of contemptuous amusement. J-J let me go without a word. At least when demons try to steal your soul they snarl and slaver and make a show out of it.